Email communications are an integral part of any business, and widely used outside of business as well. This being the case, ease of use and best of breed functionality are imperative in modern email systems. Many user interface enhancements have been added to email systems over the past several years; however, room for improvement continues to exist.
Although several new technologies currently compete as the most ubiquitous tool in business communications, email remains one of the most-used communications tools for both business and personal users. Widespread availability, ease of use, and functionality are key components, which hold email in front of other developing communications methods; however, as new technologies compete for the top spot, email applications must continue to build upon the strong foundation currently in place to maintain their edge. By any current standard, email applications would have to be rated as mature technology; however, if improvements in email applications slow, and other tools continue to improve, loss of market share will undoubtedly result.
One key feature missing in legacy email tools is an “action required/action taken” management system to assist the user in responding to email messages. With legacy email functionality, it is only with great difficulty that the user can open his or her in-box and determine which messages require action, and what should be the respective priority of each of the messages requiring action. During busy periods this information is imperative, as the user may otherwise viewed as unresponsive, when in fact the user may simply be responding to messages of lower priority. The average email user receives many tens/hundreds of email messages every day/week. It is currently a cumbersome task to track which messages a user should respond to in the time allotted, and which messages can wait for a reply at a later time. Ideally the user would want to respond to the most important messages first, while leaving lower priority messages for response during less busy periods of the day/week. A user's in-box may at any given point contain many “active” documents, and the process of identifying messages which the user must reply to, or messages where the user is dependent upon an action from a remote party, is manual and inefficient. An example of this problem could be the case where a user sends an email to his/her manager requesting approval of an expense report. With legacy email applications the user is not informed when an action has occurred, and he/she must manually follow up to ensure that the appropriate action has taken place.
At the present time, Lotus Notes provides some alternatives that address this issue. However, these email applications have limited functionality in the area of notifying a user of need to perform an action in response to a received message. FIG. 1 shows delivery options available to the sender of an email message that will prompt the recipient of the message. This display contains basic information for the recipient and includes a ‘Please reply by’ date and an expiration date. FIG. 2 shows another example of delivery options available for the sender. This display has more options, but is still fairly basic in its capabilities. FIG. 3 shows a display with more options, but only allows for one response by the recipient. Since the message link is generated by the system it is not possible for the sender to customize or control the nature of the response by the recipient. FIG. 4 is a display that gives the recipient more choices for a response to the sender. However, the responses are “canned” and very limited. It is not obvious that the general end-user would be able to easily create these custom form letters. FIG. 5 is an example of a current display for a local action required for a received email.
Therefore, there remains a need for a method and system at the recipient location that can notify an electronic mail message recipient of the requirement to reply to the received message and the priority requirements surrounding such a message reply. In addition, a system is needed in which the user can be assisted through visual cues as to which messages need immediate response, and which need response but have a lower priority.